Jonathan Weber, November 12, 2007, Times Online

Web content may be resistant to regulation, but the architecture of the internet is a battleground for lobbyists and lawmakers.

The never-ending battles over communications regulation are one of Washington DC's least edifying spectacles. The issues are arcane, the corporate stakes are high, and as a result the "public interest" generally takes a back seat to the manoeuvrings of the well-funded lobbying machines of the broadcasters, the phone companies and, increasingly, the internet industry.

Last week, a group of Republican lawmakers called for further examination of Google's proposed acquisition of Doubleclick, citing the privacy issues raised by the deal. Since Republicans generally are concerned about neither privacy nor the anti-trust implications of industry consolidation, the move looks suspiciously like an anti-Google effort. And who is anti-Google? Media companies and phone companies, for starters.

Google is squaring up against Washington's lobbying superpowers on several other issues as well. Google pushed hard, with mixed results, to have the rules for an upcoming auction of radio spectrum for new mobile communications services require that purchasers of the spectrum take an open approach to network architecture. The incumbent cellphone carriers, led by Verizon and AT&T, have no interest in this, and in fact have business models based on tight control of their networks. They may outbid Google for the spectrum just to keep the internet juggernaut off their turf.

Then there is "net neutrality," the idea that internet access providers be required to treat all bits on their network equally. Google and most of the internet industry favours this, at least for now, lest they be extorted into paying extra money to internet service providers (i.e. phone and cable companies) to assure unimpeded access to their services. Net neutrality isn't going anywhere for the moment in DC (guess who's against is?) but the issue is by no means dead.

In fact, a group of private individuals organised recently by members of a long-running and influential email list called IP is setting itself up as a the Network Neutrality Squad. The goal is monitor "anticompetitive, discriminatory, or other restrictive actions by internet service providers…" There are already plenty of examples of behaviour that could fall into these categories, including a recent move by Verizon to re-route any miss-typed internet addresses to its own search page.

There is also another battle brewing over the FCC’s rules on media ownership, notably regulations that prevent the cross-ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the same market. Broadcasters and big newspaper companies hate these rules, but others in the communications business likes them because they hobble competitors – and Democratic politicians find them to be a good headline-grabber.

The fact that Democrats led the 1996 rewrite of the Communications Act that eased these rules significantly and allowed further consolidation (and in the case of the radio business a corresponding deterioration of programming in local markets), well, that was then.

In principle, robust competition would make all of these issues go away. If you have a lot of choice in where you get your news and information (as you do now on a national level but no so much for locally) you wouldn't need rules on media ownership. If you have multiple choices on internet service providers, you could opt for the one that had rules to your liking. (These is still some hope that cable and phone companies won't have a total duopoly on internet access – here in Missoula we just got a new provider offering broadband services based on WiMax wireless technology, and personally I'm delighted about that).

If you want a cellphone provider that lets you hook up whatever you want to the network and doesn't make you use their phones, well, hopefully there will be some of those.

But the history of these businesses suggests that competition won't happen by itself. In communications, there tend to be massive economies of scale, so companies are always looking to consolidate. (Witness the pending merger of the two satellite radio providers, Sirius and XM, as a textbook example of this.) The rules really do matter, and while those economies of scale can sometimes lead to better services and lower prices, they can also lead to quasi-monopolies and duopolies, with just the opposite result. One can only hope that the lobbying wars leave just al little bit of space for the public interest.